The essay criticizes two studies[1][2] by Marx's fellow Young HegelianBruno Bauer on the attempt by Jews to achieve political emancipation in Prussia. Bauer argued that Jews could achieve political emancipation only by relinquishing their particular religious consciousness, since political emancipation requires a secular state, which he assumes does not leave any "space" for social identities such as religion. According to Bauer, such religious demands are incompatible with the idea of the "Rights of Man." True political emancipation, for Bauer, requires the abolition of religion.

Marx uses Bauer's essay as an occasion for his own analysis of liberal rights, arguing that Bauer is mistaken in his assumption that in a "secular state" religion will no longer play a prominent role in social life, and giving as an example the pervasiveness of religion in the United States, which, unlike Prussia, had no state religion. In Marx's analysis, the "secular state" is not opposed to religion, but rather actually presupposes it. The removal of religious or property qualifications for citizens does not mean the abolition of religion or property, but only introduces a way of regarding individuals in abstraction from them.[3] On this note Marx moves beyond the question of religious freedom to his real concern with Bauer's analysis of "political emancipation." Marx concludes that while individuals can be "spiritually" and "politically" free in a secular state, they can still be bound to material constraints on freedom by economic inequality, an assumption that would later form the basis of his critiques of capitalism.

A number of scholars and commentators regard On the Jewish Question, and in particular its second section, which addresses Bauer's work "The Capacity of Present-day Jews and Christians to Become Free", as anti-semitic.[4][5][6][7]

In Marx's view, Bauer fails to distinguish between political emancipation and human emancipation. As noted above, political emancipation in a modern state does not require the Jews (or, for that matter, the Christians) to renounce religion; only complete human emancipation would involve the disappearance of religion, but that is not yet possible "within the hitherto existing world order".

In the second part of the essay, Marx disputes Bauer's "theological" analysis of Judaism and its relation to Christianity. Bauer has stated that the renouncing of religion would be especially difficult for Jews, because Judaism is, in his view, a primitive stage in the development of Christianity. Hence, to achieve freedom by renouncing religion, the Christians would have to surmount only one stage, whereas the Jews would need to surmount two. In response to this, Marx argues that the Jewish religion does not need to be attached to the significance it has in Bauer's analysis, because it is only a spiritual reflection of Jewish economic life. This is the starting point of a complex and somewhat metaphorical argument which draws on the stereotype of the Jew as a financially apt "huckster" and posits a special connection between Judaism as a religion and the economy of contemporary bourgeois society. Thus, the Jewish religion does not need to disappear in society, as Bauer argues, because it is actually a natural part of it. Having thus figuratively equated "practical Judaism" with "huckstering and money", Marx concludes, that "the Christians have become Jews"; and, ultimately, it is mankind (both Christians and Jews[8]) that needs to emancipate itself from ("practical") Judaism. [9] Quotes from this part of the essay are frequently cited as proof of Marx' antisemitism. For analyses, see the Interpretations section.

Zur Judenfrage was first published by Marx and Arnold Ruge in February 1844 in the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher, a journal which ran only one issue. From December 1843 to October 1844, Bruno Bauer published the monthly Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung (General Literary Gazette) in Charlottenburg (now Berlin). In it, he responded to the critique of his own essays on the Jewish question by Marx and others. Then, in 1845, Friedrich Engels and Marx published a polemic critique of the Young Hegelians titled The Holy Family. In parts[10] of the book, Marx again presented his views dissenting from Bauer's on the Jewish question and on political and human emancipation.

A French translation appeared 1850 in Paris in Hermann Ewerbeck's book Qu'est-ce que la bible d'après la nouvelle philosophie allemande? (What is the Bible according to the new German philosophy?).

In 1879, historian Heinrich von Treitschke published an article Unsere Aussichten (Our Prospects), in which he demanded that the Jews should assimilate to German culture, and described Jewish immigrants as a danger for Germany. This article would stir a controversy, to which the newspaper Sozialdemokrat, edited by Eduard Bernstein, reacted by republishing almost the entire second part of Zur Judenfrage in June and July 1881.

The whole essay was republished in October 1890 in the Berliner Volksblatt, then edited by Wilhelm Liebknecht.[11]

In 1926, an English translation by H. J. Stenning, with the title On the Jewish Question, appeared in a collection of essays by Marx.[12]

A translation of Zur Judenfrage was published together with other articles of Marx in 1959 under the title "A World Without Jews".[13] The editor Dagobert D. Runes intended to show Marx's alleged anti-Semitism.[14] This edition has been criticized because the reader is not told that its title is not from Marx, and for distortions in the text.[15]

Hyam Maccoby has argued that "On the Jewish Question" is an example of what he considers to be Marx's "early anti-Semitism." According to Maccoby, Marx argues in the essay that the modern commercialized world is the triumph of Judaism, a pseudo-religion whose god is money. Maccoby has suggested that Marx was embarrassed by his Jewish background and used the Jews as a "yardstick of evil." Maccoby writes that in later years, Marx limited what he considers to be antipathy towards Jews to private letters and conversations because of strong public identification with anti-Semitism by his political enemies both on the left (Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin) and on the right (aristocracy and the Church).[5]Bernard Lewis has described "On the Jewish Question" as "one of the classics of anti-Semitic propaganda."[6] According to several scholars, for Marx Jews were the embodiment of capitalism and the representation of all its evils.[7]

Abram Leon in his book The Jewish Question (published 1946)[16] examines Jewish history from a materialist outlook. According to Leon, Marx's essay states that one “must not start with religion in order to explain Jewish history; on the contrary: the preservation of the Jewish religion or nationality can be explained only by the 'real Jew', that is to say, by the Jew in his economic and social role”.

Shlomo Avineri (1964),[18] while regarding Marx' antisemitism as a well-known fact, points out that Marx's philosophical criticism of Judaism has often overshadowed his forceful support for Jewish emancipation as an immediate political goal. Avineri notes that in Bauer's debates with a number of Jewish contemporary polemicists, Marx entirely endorsed the views of the Jewish writers against Bauer.[18] In a letter to Arnold Ruge, written March 1843,[19] Marx writes that he intended to support a petition of the Jews to the Provincial Assembly. He explains that with the fact that while he dislikes Judaism as a religion, he also remains unconvinced by Bauer's view (that the Jews shouldn't be emancipated before they abandon Judaism, see above). However, he also clarifies in the letter that his support of the petition is merely tactical, to further his efforts at weakening the Christian state.

In his book For Marx (1965), Louis Althusser claims that “in On the Jewish Question, Hegel’s Philosophy of the State, etc., and even usually in The Holy Family (...) Marx was merely applying the theory of alienation, that is, Feuerbach’s theory of ‘human nature’, to politics and the concrete activity of man, before extending it (in large part) to political economy in the Manuscripts”.[20] He opposes a tendency according to which “Capital is no longer read as On the Jewish Question, On the Jewish Question is read as Capital”.[21] For Althusser, the essay “is a profoundly ‘ideological’ text”, “committed to the struggle for Communism”, but without being Marxist; “so it cannot, theoretically, be identified with the later texts which were to define historical materialism”.[22]

David McLellan, however, has argued that "On the Jewish Question" must be understood in terms of Marx's debates with Bruno Bauer over the nature of political emancipation in Germany. According to McLellan, Marx used the word "Judentum" in its colloquial sense of "commerce" to argue that Germans suffer, and must be emancipated from, capitalism. The second half of Marx's essay, McLellan concludes, should be read as "an extended pun at Bauer’s expense."[23]

Hal Draper (1977)[24] observed that the language of Part II of On the Jewish Question followed the view of the Jews’ role given in Jewish socialist Moses Hess' essay On the Money System.

Stephen Greenblatt (1978)[25] compares the essay with Christopher Marlowe's play The Jew of Malta. According to Greenblatt, “[b]oth writers hope to focus attention upon activity that is seen as at once alien and yet central to the life of the community and to direct against that activity the anti-Semitic feeling of the audience”. Greenblatt is attributing Marx a “sharp, even hysterical, denial of his religious background”.

Yoav Peled (1992)[26] sees Marx "shifting the debate over Jewish emancipation from the plane of theology ... to the plane of sociology", thereby circumventing one of Bauer's main arguments. In Peled's view, "this was less than a satisfactory response to Bauer, but it enabled Marx to present a powerful case for emancipation while, at the same time, launching his critique of economic alienation". He concludes that "the philosophical advances made by Marx in On the Jewish Question were necessitated by, and integrally related to, his commitment to Jewish emancipation".

Others argue that On the Jewish Question is primarily a critique of liberal rights, rather than a criticism of Judaism, and that apparently anti-Semitic passages such as "Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist." should be read in that context.[27]

For sociologist Robert Fine (2006)[28] Bauer's essay “echoed the generally prejudicial representation of the Jew as ‘merchant’ and ‘moneyman’”, whereas “Marx’s aim was to defend the right of Jews to full civil and political emancipation (that is, to equal civil and political rights) alongside all other German citizens”. Fine argues that “(t)he line of attack Marx adopts is not to contrast Bauer’s crude stereotype of the Jews to the actual situation of Jews in Germany”, but “to reveal that Bauer has no inkling of the nature of modern democracy”.

While sociologist Larry Ray in his reply (2006)[29] acknowledges Fine's reading of the essay as an ironic defence of Jewish emancipation, he points out the polyvalence of Marx's language. Ray translates a sentence of Zur Judenfrage and interprets it as an assimilationist position “in which there is no room within emancipated humanity for Jews as a separate ethnic or cultural identity”, and which advocates “a society where both cultural as well as economic difference is eliminated”. Here Ray sees Marx in a “strand of left thinking that has been unable to address forms of oppression not directly linked to class”.

The political-scientist Professor Iain Hamphsher-Monk wrote in his textbook: "This work [On The Jewish Question] has been cited as evidence for Marx's supposed anti-semitism, but only the most superficial reading of it could sustain such an interpretation."[30] Also, McLellan and Francis Wheen argue readers should interpret On the Jewish Question in the deeper context of Marx's debates with Bruno Bauer, author of The Jewish Question, about Jewish emancipation in Germany. Francis Wheen says: "Those critics, who see this as a foretaste of 'Mein Kampf', overlook one, essential point: in spite of the clumsy phraseology and crude stereotyping, the essay was actually written as a defense of the Jews. It was a retort to Bruno Bauer, who had argued that Jews should not be granted full civic rights and freedoms unless they were baptised as Christians". Although, he claimed to be an atheist Bruno Bauer viewed Judaism as an inferior civilization.[31]Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, regards application of the term "antisemitism" to Marx as an anachronism—because when Marx wrote On the Jewish Question, virtually all major philosophers had expressed similar views, and the word "antisemitism" had not yet been coined, let alone developed a racial component, and little awareness existed of the depths of European prejudice against Jews. Marx thus simply expressed the commonplace thinking of his era, according to Sacks.[32]

The view of nature attained under the domination of private property and money is a real contempt for, and practical debasement of, nature; in the Jewish religion, nature exists, it is true, but it exists only in imagination.

It is in this sense that [in a 1524 pamphlet] Thomas Münzer declares it intolerable

that all creatures have been turned into property, the fishes in the water, the birds in the air, the plants on the earth; the creatures, too, must become free.[33]

In his Apology, in large parts an attack on Martin Luther, Müntzer says:

Look ye! Our sovereign and rulers are at the bottom of all usury, thievery, and robbery; they take all created things into possession. The fish in the water, birds in the air, the products of the soil – all must be theirs (Isaiah v.)[34]

The appreciation of Müntzer’s position has been interpreted as a sympathetic view of Marx towards animals.[35]

[T]he political annulment of private property not only fails to abolish private property but even presupposes it. The state abolishes, in its own way, distinctions of birth, social rank, education, occupation, when it declares that birth, social rank, education, occupation, are non-political distinctions, when it proclaims, without regard to these distinctions, that every member of the nation is an equal participant in national sovereignty, when it treats all elements of the real life of the nation from the standpoint of the state. Nevertheless, the state allows private property, education, occupation, to act in their way – i.e., as private property, as education, as occupation, and to exert the influence of their special nature. Far from abolishing these real distinctions, the state only exists on the presupposition of their existence; it feels itself to be a political state and asserts its universality only in opposition to these elements of its being.

^Lewis, Bernard (1999). Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. pp. p. 112. ISBN 0-393-31839-7, Flannery, Edward H. (2004). The Anguish of the Jews: Twenty-Three Centuries of Antisemitism. Mahwah, NY: Paulist Press. pp. p. 168. ISBN 0-8091-2702-4., According to Joshua Muravchik, political scientist at the American Enterprise Institute, Marx's aspiration for "the emancipation of society from Judaism" because "the practical Jewish spirit" of "huckstering" had taken over the Christian nations is not that far from the Nazi program's 24th point: "combat[ing] the Jewish-materialist spirit within us and without us" in order "that our nation can […] achieve permanent health." See Muravchik, Joshua (2003). Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism. San Francisco: Encounter Books. pp. 164. ISBN 1-893554-45-7.

On the other hand, if the Jew recognizes that his practical nature is futile and works to abolish it, he extricates himself from his previous development and works for human emancipation as such and turns against the supreme practical expression of human self-estrangement.

Let us consider the actual, worldly Jew – not the Sabbath Jew, as Bauer does, but the everyday Jew.

Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew.

What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.

...

The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish manner, not only because he has acquired financial power, but also because, through him and also apart from him, money has become a world power and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations. The Jews have emancipated themselves insofar as the Christians have become Jews.

...

In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.

^“(...) I have just been visited by the chief of the Jewish community here, who has asked me for a petition for the Jews to the Provincial Assembly, and I am willing to do it. However much I dislike the Jewish faith, Bauer's view seems to me too abstract. The thing is to make as many breaches as possible in the Christian state and to smuggle in as much as we can of what is rational. At least, it must be attempted--and the embitterment grows with every petition that is rejected with protestations”, postscript of a Letter from Marx to Arnold Ruge in Dresden, written: Cologne, March 13, 1843